Recently, I’ve been doing a meaningful practice with my family that I’ve been calling “Prayer Drawing.” It originally came from a conversation that I had with Steve Macchia (the author of Crafting a Rule of Life) at a conference. The first time we tried it we did it to the song “Good Shepherd” by Fernando Ortega, and our girls loved it. Lately, we’ve had the opportunity to experiment with this on a regular basis.
In a sense, what we do is kind of Lectio Divina-esque. Lectio Divina (from the Latin: divine reading) is a prayer practice where you are reading Scripture for the purpose of transformation (as opposed to information), and from the place of prayer you are postured in a place of listening for how God may be speaking to you through the text. However in this creative practice, instead of reading, it involves listening to audio. In Lectio Divina you read a text 3 or 4 times; similarly, in this practice we listen to the same song 3 to 4 times.
Setup
- 1 large Post-It pad (Amazon example)
- 1 box of markers (Amazon example)
- A song for the prayer time. (I’ve created a Spotify playlist with different songs that we’ve used: available here)
- Atmosphere: dim the lights, we have a battery powered, flameless candle – anything to make the space special.
Opening: We usually set everything up, and then listen one time through the song. Listening to the song, I ask them if they understand the song, and we talk about it. While the song is playing the first time through, I often write the song’s theme on the paper.
Draw: Then everyone begins to draw. We have a rule to not draw over someone else’s work. 🙂 We often let the song play 3-4 times (sometimes 5), which allows for about 25-30 minutes of drawing.
Closing prayer: After we are done, we usually pray 0ver our time. For example, if we were prayer drawing about God’s faithfulness, we would end our time thanking God for His faithfulness and how He works in our life.